


Destination: Arcadia

by toxicfumesandpoisonkisses



Category: Babyshambles (Band), The Libertines
Genre: Angst, Doomed Relationship, Drugs, Frenemies, Friendship, Love/Hate, M/M, Platonic Romance, Pre-2014
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-21 03:42:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6036565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toxicfumesandpoisonkisses/pseuds/toxicfumesandpoisonkisses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carl can't imagine writing songs without Pete - until he can.<br/>Pete swears he's not coming back – but they both know that he is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Destination: Arcadia

Carl often hears people remark in Wildean fashion that life imitates art, and then there are always those who are more than willing to argue that it’s the other way around over a cup of cider. As for him, having spent so many years sometimes with, other times in the shadow of Pete Doherty has thought him that the two are one and the same.

And how could they not be for someone who brings ballerinas and poets on the stage at rock festivals? For someone who so often falls into a trance-like state where he scribbles compulsively, just to smudge his blood all over the sheet once he feels that he’s at his wits' end. He tumbles over the edge separating sanity from the realms of primordial, all-engulfing chaos with such frequency that Carl often wonders whether he’s in his right mind half the time.

He often goes where all roads lead, to some transcendental dimension that harbours that bottomless well of fairy tales and messy encounters where Pete, surely, draws all his inspiration from. For he burns too bright for this realm – he always has. His very movements are poetry; the way he tilts his head to the side, and the way his fingers run through his messy mane with his rings getting caught in strands of hair, glimmering in the half-light.

Sometimes when Carl looks at Pete, he feels that he sort of understands how Pete went on to build a legend – that would surely morph into a myth in the decades to come, Carl had no doubts about that – while he remained but a sidekick to this doomed poet, this mythical hero that emerged from the sewers of London. So many whiskey-soaked nights, so many words chasing themselves in the wind, and the back and forth, the infinite attraction and repulsion that kept the two of them at arms length at all times… and still, he was but the angry stepchild, smashing bottles, starting fistfights, doing whatever he could to make himself noticed.

Looking back he sometimes cringes at the things he would do to prove that he’s worth as much as that ever so pretty waster. The fits he would throw, the punches that would follow, and all those black eyes, the ice packs, the way Pete would look at him just before Carl swung again, this time aiming for his face. He couldn’t bear the way this curious, curious creature would look at him; no, Carl needed to make him stop, and make it so that he wouldn’t ever look at him like that again. With so much anger, with so much _love_.

He had an air of tragedy and desperation to him, all times. And Carl often wondered how Pete’s the only person on the face of this Earth who can turn those things into something sweet and sticky, like icing on a cake that was teeming with worms but you wanted a taste all the same. Carl knew what it meant to be with Pete – the Pete of the Old Regime, the Pete that lived in his memories, that is. He remembered how they would drag each other into a seemingly endless abyss of deranged fun and nauseous mornings spent crouching over cracked toilet bowls.

He remembered how Pete, both in his highest and lowest moments, would taunt him to come back and fight him. Carl never knew why. Sometimes he thought Pete _wanted_ to be hurt; but when he actually hurt him Pete would go off the rails, often disappearing for days without even so much as a word. He would never hurt him back the same way Carl hurt him – he would hurt him with actions; taking his next dose in a dirty alleyway, and writing the most beautiful, most vicious songs about Carl. 

Carl has that image of him. Of Pete singing _You're my Waterloo_  by the kitchen table, looking at him with the same mix of sadness and love in his eyes that would so often torture Carl in the years to come. He felt naked and paralysed listening to Pete, as though he was stuck in an inferno of his own that was frozen in time, with that damn song on an infinite loop. It made him hurt like nothing else could. Not words, not punches. And Pete never made it any easier for him, he just continued to rub salt in the wound with increasing vigour.

Carl could never really figure out what that whole business was all about. Why they had to go and destroy each other completely, just to make up over a pack of smokes each and every time. What he did know is that he needed it like he needed air, he needed Pete to go and break his trust again, he needed to _feel_ that; the weight of betrayal, the pain of losing him all over again, just so he could go and write songs about Pete and all the ways he set Carl's world on fire and watched it burn from afar. And Carl knew that Pete needed him just the same; to be the brother he never had, the soulmate that would leave him all over again once Pete fell off the wagon and exchanged their bond for a tiny bag of drugs.

And when they were already halfway across the world, trying to escape whatever they had, came the revelation that always made them stop dead in their tracks and catch the next flight back to Albion. The revelation that made them crash into each other's arms with elemental force as Pete walked out of the airport with a single carry-on and his guitar strapped to his back. And that revelation was that however much it hurt to stay, it was a hundred times more painful to be apart. 

So they would continue their back-and-forth on an infinite loop, downing shots of whiskey and smoking packs upon packs of cigarettes in the winter chill that gave Carl's lips a rosy tint as they sat and kept smudging the line between fact and fiction as they wrote another chapter of what would soon become the legend of the Libertines. But most importantly, they never, ever, stopped writing songs. About themselves, about each other.


End file.
